Editing Seyyed Hossein Nasr (section)

====Scientism====

[[Patrick Laude]] submits that Nasr is "the only foremost perennialist writer to have received an intensive and advanced academic training in modern sciences"{{sfn|Laude|2003|p=6-7}}{{efn|"Although Guénon was a mathematician of background, he was not directly involved in the study of modern sciences nor did he manifest much interest in going beyond a general critique of modern scientific reductionism. Titus Burckhardt, and to a lesser extent Frithjof Schuon, has left us with remarkably perceptive arguments and analyses against such scientific axioms as macro-evolutionism and the superstition of materialism." Laude, "Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Context of the Perennialist School" in ''Beacon of Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr'', 2003, p. 6-7.}} while [[Joseph E. B. Lumbard]] contends that "as a trained scientist", Nasr is well suited to argue about the relationship between religion and science.{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=180}}

Summarizing Nasr's thought, Lucian W. Stone, Jr. writes in ''[[The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers]]'': "According to Nasr, while the traditional sciences – which include biology, cosmology, medicine, philosophy, metaphysics, and so on –, understood the natural phenomena and humanity as ''vestigia Dei'' (signs of God), modern science has severed the universe, including humans, from God. The natural world or cosmos has a meaning beyond itself, one of which modern secular science is intentionally ignorant".{{sfn|Stone|2005 |p=1801}}

Nasr argues that historically Western science is "inextricably linked to Islamic science and before it to the Greco-Alexandrian, Indian, ancient Iranian as well as Mesopotamian and Egyptian sciences". Denying this heritage, the Renaissance already – despite some resistance –, but especially the 17th century ([[Descartes]], [[Galileo]], [[Kepler]], [[Isaac Newton|Newton]]), imposed new paradigms in accordance with the ambient anthropocentrism and rationalism, and with the secularization of the cosmos, which have resulted in a "unilateral and monolithic science, [...] bound to a single level of reality [...], a profoundly terrestrial and externalized science".{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=37}}

While not denying the prowess "of a science limited to the physical dimension of reality", Nasr nonetheless argues that "alternative worldviews drawn from traditional doctrines remain constantly aware of the inner nexus which binds physical nature to the realm of Spirit, and the outward face of things to an inner reality which they at once veil and reveal".{{sfn|Man and Nature|1991 |p=4}} For the traditional sciences of all civilizations, the universe is formed by a hierarchy of degrees, the most "external" or "lowest" degree being the physical world, the only one that modern science recognizes; this lower degree reflects the higher degrees of the universe "by means of symbols which have remained an ever open gate towards the Invisible".{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=50}}

Nasr speaks of "certain intuitions and discoveries" of contemporary scientists, "which reveal the Divine Origin of the natural world",{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=50}} a deduction that scientism does not want to admit, "the scientific philosophers are much more dogmatic than many scientists in denying any metaphysical significance to the discoveries of science".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=101}} Scientism presents "modern science not as a particular way of knowing nature, but as a complete and totalitarian philosophy which reduces all reality to the physical domain and does not wish under any condition to accept the possibility of the existence of non-scientistic worldviews".{{sfn|Man and Nature|1991 |p=4}} However, Nasr notes, a large number of eminent physicists "have often been the first to deny scientism and even the so-called scientific method [...], seeking to go beyond the scientific reductionism which has played such a great role in the desacralization of nature and of knowledge itself".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=101-102}}

According to Lumbard, Nasr considers that:

{{blockquote|Science in and of itself is neutral, and the information that scientific discovery provides is true on its own plane, but science falls into error when it crosses from the realm of scientific investigation into that of scientistic ideology, generalizing and absolutizing a particular vision of the physical domain of the universe that science is able to study and then judging the other disciplines in accord with that narrow vision. [...] Nasr calls for a reintegration of modern science into metaphysics and the traditional cosmological sciences in which knowledge of the level of reality that each discipline is equipped to analyze is perceived through the light of higher forms of knowledge, at the apex of which stands the knowledge of the One before which all is reduced to nothingness.{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=181-182}}}}